Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 94

What we learned this week

Britain has lost 90% of its seagrass meadows, most of that in the last three decades. This is a major opportunity for restoration and ocean farming.

Good interview in Vox that makes the connection between climate change and offshore tax havens.

Having written about how France is building a repair culture recently, it was great to read that the government will adopt the EU’s repair standards from the summer.

Bangladesh has scrapped plans for nine new coal power plants, more evidence t...

How we insulated under our floors

Regular readers will know about my plan to get our house to an A rating by 2020, and net zero by 2025. I missed the 2020 deadline due to the government mis-handling the Green Homes Grant, but this week the underfloor insulation went in. I won’t be commissioning a new Energy Performance Certificate to confirm it, but it’s now pretty comprehensively in the A zone.

Homes lose heat in all directions. We’d already insulated the loft, a double layer with insulation rolls and then foil. We’ve g...

Covid vaccines and the off-grid fridge

In 2018 I wrote a whole week’s worth of posts on refrigeration, including a profile of the company SureChill. They manufacture a fridge that works on a completely different technology to any other fridge in the world, and they sell to developing countries for vaccine storage.

The key selling point for SureChill is that their machines stay cool even when the power goes out, and can run for days with no electricity supply. It makes them perfect for clinics running on solar power without batter...

Book review: Breathless, by Chris Woodford

There is nothing more natural than breathing. As the back cover blurb for Chris Woodford’s Breathless points out, we all do it 20,000 times a day. And yet what we breathe into our bodies is far from natural, and really quite complicated.

Breathless is an impressive overview of the issue of air pollution. And the first thing to note about it is that “‘air pollution’ is a bit of a misnomer: it’s not one neat and easy-to-tackle problem but many subtly different, difficult issues that don’t ...

Where the news goes unreported

At the weekend, two young parents gave an interview on television, in which they implied that all is not well in one of history’s most privileged families. Every commentator in the land then had their say, either agreeing and sympathising, or leaping to the defence of the royal family. The column inches generated by this event are formidable. Today I counted 42 articles on the Daily Express homepage alone, and gave up at 53 halfway down the Daily Mail homepage.

There are multiple levels of re...

What we learned this week

Steven Donzinger is a New York lawyer who has been working to fight American oil companies pollution in indigenous lands in Ecuador and elsewhere since the nineties. He won a $9.5 billion case against Chevron in 2011. He is currently under house arrest, facing a highly dubious private prosecution brought by Chevron. A campaign has emerged to support him and protect those who take on the oil companies.

Does your local council invest in fossil fuels through its pension funds? A new data portal ...

A washing machine for a circular economy

I recently wrote about how France is investing in a culture of repair, as part of a broad shift towards a circular economy. New standards for repairability and durability will help to push manufacturers to improve the quality of their products, and one company is already running with the idea.

L’Increvable – which translates as ‘the indestructible’ – is a start-up company developing a new kind of washing machine. It is specifically intended as a sustainable appliance, and that includes a num...

What we can learn from Wangari Maathai

On Monday I reviewed Wangari Maathai’s biography, Unbowed. But Wangari Maathai Day is actually today and I wanted to reflect a little more on what we can learn from the life of Kenya’s best known environmentalist.

Maathai hailed from the Rift Valley, where I spent some very formative years myself. I witnessed the majesty of Kenya’s forests and its wildlife there, but also the effects of forest fires, deforestation, erosion and drought. My environmentalism has been shaped by some of the same ...

10 facts about air pollution

This week I’ve been reading a new book called Breathless: Why air pollution matters – and how it affects you. It’s by the science writer Chris Woodford and it’s rather good. Review to come later, but as I’ve been reading, I’ve been struck several times by the scale and scope of air pollution. I thought I’d pull together 10 facts from the many in the book to give a sense of why we need to talk about it a lot more than we do.

Air pollution kills at least 7 million people every year, which is ...

Book review: Unbowed, by Wangari Maathai

Africa celebrates Wangari Maathai Day every March, on the same day as Africa Environment Day, in honour of the continent’s first female Nobel Peace Prize Winner. There are particular reasons to note it this year, as it is the tenth anniversary of Maathai’s death and a good time to remember her legacy. With that in mind, I thought I’d re-read and review her 2006 auto-biography, Unbowed.

Born in 1940 into colonial Kenya, Maathai grew up on a farm in the Rift Valley – not far from where I sp...